About Me

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Forbidden Planet (MGM, 1956)

When I finally did
get to Charles’ place I ran yet another pre-recorded tape we hadn’t got around
to watching yet: Forbidden Planet,
an MGM production from 1956 that was one of the rare major-studio forays into
science-fiction at the time. This was generally considered the most
intellectually sophisticated science-fiction movie made to that time (and
indeed it retained that reputation until the release of 2001, also an MGM film, 12 years later), though it’s
hardly the best sci-fi movie of the 1950’s — The Day the Earth Stood
Still and the original Invasion
of the Body Snatchers both hold up better.
I hadn’t seen Forbidden Planet
since the early 1970’s (and then only on a black-and-white TV; this for a film
whose color design is one of its chief sources of appeal!); Charles had seen it
more recently (recently enough that he’d seen it on a color TV);
and neither of us had seen it letterboxed (a welcome innovation but, though the
film was originally in CinemaScope, it didn’t use the width of the screen as
extensively as, say, the 1954 Black Widow or 1955 East of Eden and
therefore less was lost in the pan-and-scan version). Afterwards Charles said
he hadn’t remembered how great a movie it was or how silly it was, and that about summed up my
reaction to it. On the plus side were the special effects — which have dated a
bit (the flying saucer commander Leslie Nielsen — with his current reputation
it’s hard these days to watch him in anything without laughing! — and his crew fly to meet up with
reclusive scientist Walter Pidgeon on planet Altair-IV bobbed up and down on
its strings against the painted backdrops of Cedric Gibbons’ and Arthur
Lonergan’s spacescapes almost as much as the cigar-shaped ships of Flash Gordon
and his adversaries had done in the Universal serials two decades earlier) but
some of which remain stunning (particular the tracks of the monster and its
appearance in red silhouette as it attacks the crew of the spaceship). Also on
the plus side was much of the acting, notably Walter Pidgeon’s — who was
surprisingly good as the reclusive Morbius, sole survivor of the previous
expedition to Altair-IV, portraying an irascibility somewhat surprising to
anyone who thinks of that nice
Walter Pidgeon who was married to Greer Garson in so many soppy melodramae.
(It’s hardly a slam on Pidgeon to note that, as good as he was, Boris Karloff
could have played his part far better — though Karloff’s name on the credits
would have “typed” it as a horror film, he was a much subtler and
broader-ranging actor who would have made the final scenes, in which he
immolates himself and the entire planet to save the universe from the monster
his own id has created, truly heartbreaking instead of just conclusive.) Also
on the plus side were the production values, the spare-no-expense set designs
that reproduced the scientific achievements of the Krell, the long-forgotten
indigenous civilization of Altair-IV, who invented self-perpetuating machines
and worked out a scientific innovation that allowed them to do without bodies
altogether — only to find, too late, that this made them vulnerable to the
monsters from their own ids (even
in a sci-fi genre piece, Hollywood’s fascination with Freudian psychology
couldn’t help but come out!).

On the minus side were some overly campy plot devices — like
Robby the Robot, who’s cute and charming but really cuts down this film’s
thrill quotient — and another one in which Pidgeon’s daughter (Anne Francis of Bad
Day at Black Rock and The Scarlet
Coat, here playing an almost impossible
role and playing it quite well — judging from the three films of hers I’ve seen
she clearly could act and
deserved major stardom; what happened?) has been insulated from all other
humans for her entire life (her mother died when the daughter was still an
infant and all the other humans on Pidgeon’s crew had passed even before that),
and so she reacts naïvely when the other humans (all male) attempt to kiss her.
It’s the same gag W. C. Fields had done 15 years before with Susan Miller’s
character in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, but at least Fields intended it to be funny! Also on the minus side was some
clunky dialogue — noting the basis of the plot in Shakespeare’s last play, The
Tempest (which really incensed Jon Douglas Eames in his entry on this film
in The MGM Story — he seemed
almost viscerally angry that writers Irving Block and Allen Adler took credit
for writing an “original” story Cyril Hume then adapted into a screenplay), a
1977 New Yorker writer said
sourly, “It’s a pity they didn’t lift some of Shakespeare’s language.” (At
least two of the most interesting works of the 1930’s lifted their titles from The
Tempest: Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave
New World and Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rich
and Strange.) And the biggest minus was the
sluggish direction of Fred McLeod Wilcox (as he was billed — I’ve seen other
credits of his list him simply as “Fred M. Wilcox”), who seemed so conscious of
the Importance of this production (with a capital “I”) that he moved it along
like an historical pageant instead of the crackling-tough action picture it could have been. Oddly, the climax is quite exciting —
Wilcox finally gets the lead out
of his cameras and turns in an exciting suspense sequence as the monster stalks
Pidgeon, Nielsen and Francis through the strongest defenses Krell technology
(or at least what little Pidgeon has been able to learn of it) can muster — but
the earlier part of the film drags badly. And Carlos Clarens didn’t like the design of the monster; in his Illustrated History
of the Horror Film he wrote:

Direction does not count for much
that is essential in films of this genre, where themes can be put across
successfully by the art director, the special effects department, even by the
sensuousness of the color or the quality of the sound track. [Forbidden Planet is especially good in the last department, thanks to
Louis and Bebe Barron’s “electronic tonalities” in lieu of a conventional
musical score.] Yet, in spite of its electronic tonalities and endearing,
well-bred robot, it has to fall back, for its climax, on the most conventional
monster fiction. Once materialized, the Monster of the Mind looks like a
panther silhouetted in red (the work of cartoon designers from the Walt Disney
studios), and this denouement is as incongruous as if Spencer Tracy’s Mr. Hyde
had strayed aboard Gemini X.

Oddly, the monster didn’t bother me that much — it looked astonishingly credible (it’s one of the best visual
effects in the film!) and its rather prosaic contours can be explained because
it’s supposed to be the projection of Morbius’ own “dark side” and therefore
would look like a familiar image of terror to a human being. More bothersome
was the lack of any external detailing on the flying saucer (one of the most
welcome innovations of 2001 was
that the spaceships in it looked
like real mechanical devices and not child’s toys, and while it undoubtedly
made the actual manufacture of the models used to represent them much more
difficult and expensive, it also added a lot to the verisimilitude). On the whole, Forbidden
Planet holds up as a surprisingly good
excursion into science fiction, a bit too conscious of its Shakespearean
pedigree in Wilcox’s slow-paced direction and Pidgeon’s performance (no one
else in the movie, except Francis as his daughter, really distinguishes himself
— non-inclusive pronoun justified because Francis’ character is the only woman in the dramatis personae) and variable in the effects department, but oddly
moving, especially in the ending (in which Pidgeon, his monster alter
ego and the entire remnants of the Krell
super-civilization go up in an atomic explosion he has deliberately set — like
the lab in The Bride of Frankenstein, the Krell installation came equipped with a self-destruct mechanism)
and distinguished as one of the few big-budget, major-studio excursions into
hard-core science-fiction until the successes of 2001 and Star Wars established the genre
once and for all. — 11/9/98

•••••

I also finished reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which I’d wanted to go through to see if Forbidden
Planet is really as similar to it as Jon
Douglas Eames and other writers have claimed. Yes and no. The screenwriters of Forbidden
Planet (Irving Block, Allen Adler and Cyril
Hume) took the basic situation of The Tempest — sort of (their spacecraft didn’t land on the planet by accident after a storm, but
went there deliberately) and six of the characters — Prospero, Ariel, Caliban,
Miranda, Ferdinand and the drunken butler Stephano — but significantly altered
the story. In The Tempest
Prospero is a dethroned duke of Milan and he deliberately causes the shipwreck which entraps all his enemies
(including Antonio, his brother, who dethroned him; and Alonso, the King of
Naples, who put Antonio up to it and recognized him) on his island.

Also, Prospero intends
his daughter Miranda and Ferdinand (son of Alonso) to get together from the
start — and Caliban isn’t a “monster of the id,” but a genuine person,
described in the dramatis personae as
“a savage and deformed slave” with a witch, Sycorax, for a mother (we’re never
told who his father is, which might lead some enterprising scholar or producer
to “read” the play in a way that would make Prospero himself the father,
thereby establishing a sibling relationship between the good Miranda and the
evil Caliban and also explaining why Prospero feels responsible for Caliban —
much the way Schickaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s The Magic Flute is sometimes read to make Sarastro Pamina’s father
and the Queen of the Night’s ex-lover), while Ariel commands a whole crew of
spirits and puts them at Prospero’s service. What seemed oddest about The
Tempest is how undramatic it really is.
After that savage shipwreck in the opening act, virtually nothing else happens.
Ferdinand and Miranda have a nice pastoral idyll on the island (while Prospero
is getting his revenge by carefully leading Alonso, Ferdinand’s father, into
thinking his son is dead). Two separate plots are hatched against Prospero’s
life (one by Alonso and Antonio and one by Stephano, another servant on the
ship, and Caliban), but because Prospero’s network of nymphs, fairies, spirits
and whatnot lets him know about them almost as soon as they are planned, they don’t become dramatic issues either. What makes The
Tempest a worthy Shakespearean masterwork
is the eloquence of the language — perhaps more so than in his earlier plays
precisely because it doesn’t have
to drive a dramatic plot; and it’s hard, knowing that this is one of
Shakespeare’s last works and he was about to retire, not to read something
autobiographical in the figure of Prospero in general (an old man whose entire
power lay in his books!) and in this great speech from Act IV, scene 1 in
particular:

You do look, my son, in a moved
sort,

As if you were dismayed. Be
cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our
actors

As I foretold you, were all spirits
and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of
this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the
gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe
itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall
dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial
pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are
such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our
little life

Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am
vexed.

Bear with my weakness. My old brain
is troubled.

Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

If you be pleased, retire into my
cell

And there repose. A turn or two
I’ll walk

To still my beating mind. —
11/13/98

•••••

Last night Charles and I had an interesting experience at the
ConDor science-fiction convention in San Diego we’ve just attended for the
third (me) and fifth (him) year in a row: we got to see presentations by Robert
Welch, grandson of the MGM special-effects head Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie, on
the effects work in The Wizard of Oz
(1939) and Forbidden Planet
(1956). Welch was there to give the presentations and also promote a
large-format book he just published on his grandfather, The Wizard of
MGM, and according to his presentation it
seems as if Gillespie coined the term “special effects” when he asked for and
received permission to set up a department specifically devoted to them at MGM
in the 1930’s. (Before that they had been given the rather dismissive name
“trick shots,” and when David O. Selznick tried to get the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences to give a special award to Willis O’Brien for the
still extraordinary effects shots in the 1933 King Kong, he got the dismissive answer, “We have no intention
of giving awards for trick work.” The Academy didn’t inaugurate an award for
special effects until 1939.) Welch began both presentations by emphasizing that
MGM was a self-contained community that had all the physical facilities to make
a movie completely on its own lot — and all the people, divided into an almost
militarily precise layout of departments, with all the skills they needed —
though the studio system and the guaranteed revenues that had made this possible,
coming both from the big studios’ monopolistic control of the largest and most
profitable theatres (broken with the consent decree in the U.S. v. Paramount antitrust case in 1948) and their general monopoly on audio-visual
entertainment until the development of commercial television after World War
II, were on their way out by 1956. Indeed, one imdb.com “trivia” poster on Forbidden
Planet noted that the script required
animation effects — and to create them MGM had to borrow animator Joshua Meador
from Walt Disney Studios because they had just closed their own animation
department and laid off all the people it had employed. (Among them were its
heads, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who continued their own careers by
forming their own studio and producing crude but incredibly popular cartoons
for TV.) Fortunately, Gerry Williams, who runs showings of science-fiction
movies in San Diego the third weekend of every month, decided to show Forbidden
Planet as the Saturday night movie at
ConDor (he actually double-billed it with an atrocious Hammer production called
Moon Zero Two, a boring film that
basically transposed a standard Western plot to the moon), and it was an
extraordinary opportunity to see a film just after we’d watched a live
presentation on how some of the effects were achieved. Forbidden
Planet was a 1956 science-fiction film from
MGM, given a production budget of $1 million (which they actually blew just on
building the sets — it cost them another $900,000 on top of that to shoot the
movie itself) and a full major-studio production, including wide-screen, color
and Perspecta stereo sound (though I’m not sure a Perspecta print still
exists). This was at a time when science-fiction movies were mostly cheap “B”
productions, shot on black-and-white with low budgets, non-star casts and hack
directors (two exceptions to the latter: Robert Wise on the 1951 version of The
Day the Earth Stood Still and Howard Hawks
on the 1951 version of The Thing
— Hawks was credited only as producer, with his long-time editor Christian Nyby
listed as director, but according to modern accounts they co-directed), and
usually aimed at children.

Forbidden Planet was one of the periodic attempts by a major studio to
do a science-fiction film with all the sophistication and intellectual
understanding of the best science-fiction writing, and while MGM would do a far
better job 12 years later with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey (which benefited immensely not only
from Kubrick’s own imagination but his use of a “name” sci-fi writer, Arthur C.
Clarke, for his basic story and script) Forbidden Planet is quite a good try. I’d seen it at least twice
before — in the 1970’s on an over-the-air TV in black-and-white and in the late
1990’s with Charles on a VHS tape I bought at the late, lamented Sam Goody’s
downtown one afternoon and we screened that evening — but last night I liked it
better than I have before even though it remains a film I respect more than I
actually love. (At ConDor there was a brief parlor game in which people were
challenged to come up with their five favorite science-fiction films of all
time — I left the fifth slot open on my list but my first four would be 2001, Andrei Tarkovsky’s original Solaris, Fritz Lang’s 1928 Woman on the Moon and the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, in that order.) Forbidden Planet was produced by Nicholas Nayfack, directed by Fred
McLeod Wilcox (whose previous claim to fame had been directing most of MGM’s Lassie movies) and written by Cyril Hume from an “original”
story by Irving Block and Allen Adler that owed more than a little to
Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The
crew of a spaceship (designed to look like a pristine flying saucer and awfully
dated-looking after we’ve become used to the carefully crafted space vehicles
of Star Trek, 2001 and Star
Wars) led by Commander Adams (Leslie
Nielsen, whose part is absolutely serious but whose presence, especially his
voice, makes the film hopelessly risible to anyone who knows him just from the Police
Squad/Naked Gun and Airplane spoofs) receives orders to stop by the planet
Altair-4 to see what became of the spacecraft Bellerophon, which went to Altair-4 20 years earlier and was
never heard from again. When Adams and his crew (all male, all white —
especially noticeable seeing this movie during a science-fiction convention one
of whose workshops had dealt with sexism in the genre!) arrive at Altair-4 and start orbiting the planet
in preparation for landing, they get a radio message from Professor Edward
Morbius (Walter Pidgeon, top-billed), sole survivor of the Bellerophon expedition. Morbius warns them not to land because
everyone else on the Bellerophon
was killed by a mysterious force unleashed on the planet — he doesn’t get any
more specific than that — and the only survivors were Morbius himself and a
female crew member (so they did
have at least one woman in
space!) whom he married in a ceremony performed on board the Bellerophon by its captain.

The two survived the mysterious
catastrophe that killed the rest of the crew (and vaporized the Bellerophon itself when crew members who hadn’t been killed on
the planet’s surface tried to escape in it) and conceived a daughter, Altaira
(Anne Francis, a wonderful actress wasted, as usual, in a role that didn’t
offer her much), only shortly after that Mrs. Morbius died (in childbirth, we
get the impression, though that’s not specified in the script itself) and the
good doctor has raised Altaira as a single parent and the only other human she
has ever known. When he hasn’t been rearing her he’s been exploring the secrets
of the Krell, Altair-4’s indigenous inhabitants, who developed both technology
and morality far beyond what Earth has been able to achieve — only 20,000 years
ago their entire population self-destructed in a single day. Morbius has been
trying to figure out why, and also how much of the Krell’s technology can
safely be entrusted to Earthlings, and needless to say he doesn’t want those
creepy people from Earth invading his technological paradise. In particular he
doesn’t want all those horny space sailors invading his daughter and taking
away her carefully protected virginity. This plot line is another aspect of Forbidden
Planet that comes awfully close to camp; 15
years earlier W. C. Fields had made the comedy Never Give a Sucker an
Even Break, in which in order to protect
her daughter’s virtue, socialite Mrs. Hemogloben (Margaret Dumont in her best
performance in a non-Marx Brothers film) has hidden them both away on a
mountaintop and carefully concealed from her the very existence of men — and
though the writers and director of Forbidden Planet weren’t trying for comedy, the portrayal of Anne
Francis’ total sexual naïveté comes awfully close to unintentional laughs. To
run his establishment, including acting as a manservant (though actually
carefully specified as not having a gender), Morbius early on used the first
bits of Krell technology he could understand to build Robby the Robot (voiced
by actor Marvin Miller, though apparently there were various stunt doubles
actually in the robot suit, including its creator, Robert Kinoshita), which can
duplicate any human foodstuff (there’s a quite amusing comic-relief scene in
which the spaceship’s cook asks it to make him some whiskey, and the robot
says, “Will 60 gallons suffice?”) and do just about anything, though it draws
the line at actually attacking another human being. (I doubt if the writers had
heard of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but they came up with something
pretty similar.) So the dramatis personae on Altair-4 include a Prospero, a Miranda and an Ariel (the robot),
but the Caliban (Shakespeare’s brooding, brutish villain) isn’t revealed until
nearly the end of the movie.

It turns out that the Krell had managed to create
a perfect society with no scarcity, no hatred, no conflict and no war, but that
wasn’t enough for them; they tried to harness their own mental energies and
combine them with their super-computer system (fueled by nuclear reactions deep
under their planet so they would never have to worry about running out of
energy) to gain the power to materialize anything they wanted out of pure
thought. Only the process also unlocked the more sordid aspects of both human
and Krell nature — greed, meanness, viciousness, revenge — all associated with
the Id, which Morbius denounces as an obsolete term for the human subconscious
(ironically, one of the best predictions in Forbidden Planet, made at a time when Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the
mind and the formation of human nature were practically a religion, was that
eventually virtually the whole apparatus of Freud’s theories would drop out of
both public discourse and actual treatment of mental illness!) and which
emerges as a lion-like invisible (except when being bombarded by electricity or
radiation) creature that was responsible for the destruction of the Bellerophon and most of its crew and is now wreaking havoc on
Commander Adams’ crew members as well. Eventually Morbius realizes that he’s
created a Krell-like monster out of his own Id and the only way he can spare
both his daughter and the rest of the human race from the Krell’s fate is to
trick Adams into pushing the self-destruct button on the floor of his
laboratory that will cause the Krell reactors to go super-critical and blow up
Altair-4 (odd that they would rip off the laboratory self-destruct mechanism
from The Bride of Frankenstein!),
so he sends his daughter off with Adams and the surviving crew members of
Adams’ ship take off while Morbius, his planet and the Krell technology (except
for Robby, who ends up aboard the ship with Adams and Altaira) explode in
space. The Id creature was created by Joshua Meador and acted by Robert Dix,
who also doubled as one of the crew on Adams’ ship — Meador traced over Dix’s
actions as filmed on an empty stage, making Dix arguably the first
motion-capture actor in film history. Another aspect of Forbidden
Planet the film pioneered is in its score,
which was made up exclusively of electronic burbles by husband-and-wife
composers Louis and Bebe Barron — though since they were not members of the
musicians’ union they could not be credited as musicians or composers. So their
burbling all-electronic score (which mostly works well even though there are a
few cues that sound like computers farting) was credited as “electronic tonalities.”
(This is the same kind of treatment one of the great names in movie effects,
German cinematographer Eugen Schufftan — who invented the process screen in the
1920’s for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen and Metropolis — got;
when he fled the Nazis and came to the U.S. the cinematographers’ union
wouldn’t allow him in, so the only studio that would hire him was the cheap PRC
outfit, and instead of crediting him with cinematography or photographic
effects they had to give him nebulous credits like “supervisor of production
design.”)

Forbidden Planet is a
great movie, though there’s still an air of bookishness about it (Jon Douglas
Eames’ book The MGM Story said
that as long as Cyril Hume was ripping off his plot from Shakespeare’s The
Tempest he should have stolen Shakespeare’s
dialogue as well), a sense of potentials in the story unrealized in the film we
actually have. It was certainly a major influence on later science-fiction film
in general and on Star Trek in
particular (Gene Roddenberry admitted it); plenty of episodes in the various Star
Trek franchises ripped off Forbidden
Planet to one extent or another, and the
very first Star Trek pilot, “The
Cage” (later revamped and aired in a tweaked version as “The Menagerie”), is
also about a starship crew that gets into trouble when they land on a planet
whose inhabitants have overdeveloped their brain power to a reckless and
dangerous extent. Forbidden Planet
is beautiful (though all too many of the backdrops look like the matte paintings they were), it benefits
from color and a major-studio infrastructure, and it’s quite well acted —
though through much of its running time I found myself wishing Boris Karloff
had been playing Walter Pidgeon’s role. Not only would it have provided Karloff
a career boost in a serious film comparable to what he got from Frankenstein in 1931 and Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher in 1945, and would have likely spared him a good
deal of the dreck he had to do in his last 13 years, but Karloff could have
made Morbius, torn between his love for his daughter and his intoxicated
fascination with the Krell technology, a genuinely pathetic and even tragic
figure instead of a man who, for all his super-intelligence (artificially
boosted by a Krell education machine), seems all too befuddled by what’s going
on around him. At the same time I realize the problems that would have been
created by casting Karloff: the audience would have expected him from the get-go to be creating a monster (even
if inadvertently) and the appearance of the Id creature wouldn’t have had the
surprise and shock the filmmakers wanted. Forbidden Planet (originally shot under the working title Fatal
Planet until someone at MGM realized that
would make it seem too dire and likely turn off audiences instead of attracting
them) is an important milestone in the generally dire history of sci-fi on
film, and this time around I enjoyed it more than I have before, but my
reactions still come with a lot of “Yes, but … ” — 3/15/15